Just like a bouquet of flowers, a gift basket should have a nice color palette, beautiful arrangement including varying heights and fullness, and quality products (while in a bouquet that would mean young and healthy flowers – in this case it means gourmet or homemade food items). And not unlike flowers, your gift needs the right container – a beautiful basket or box to hold all that is to come.

This gift basket in particular, is a housewarming gift for a very dear friend of ours. We knew we wanted to get her something kitchen and food related because we figured, ‘Hey, you can never have too much good food in the house’. We bought everything in this picture in one store and you can too. We chose to shop at HomeGoods but you can also do this at Cost Plus World Market, Whole Foods, Bristol Farms – you get the idea. We went with HomeGoods because we knew we could get gourmet items on a college girl’s budget.

As you can see above, we really wanted to stick with earthy, copper tones for the basket. Initially when we went shopping, we decided to put anything and everything that caught our eye in our basket. Well, we ended up having a VERY full basket. To narrow it down we decided to come up with themes – red toned, baking, sweets, savory, blues – you get the idea. Finally we settled on copper.

Because we were already at a savings store, we didn’t pay too much attention to the prices but if you’re on a stricter budget you can easily make a basket just as a beautiful with a cheaper price tag. Just to get an idea of the cost we’ve listed the receipt below.